Okay, so John Currin left the Andrea Rosen Gallery for Gagosian. And this rates an article in the New York Times? And it was a bitchy article, too, where Roberta Smith turns to David Zwirner to make us feel sorry for the art dealers who get burned, but wonder aloud if maybe Andrea Rosen deserved the burn.

John Currin is getting a 14-year mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2004. If that ain’t ready for Go-Go, nothing is.

The following may seem totally self-involved, but I started off thinking what a lame and boring year it was and then started remembering actually doing quite a bit and now I feel great and optimistic and all that…

HIGHLIGHTS OF MY 2003:1. What did you do in 2003 that you’d never done before?
There were two that stand out.
Attended a professional minor league baseball game.
Took an Amtrak ride across country.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
No. Yes.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
A lot of neighbors did, no relatives did.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
My girlfriend’s brother Frank, and Lulu, the woman who babysat me as a kid.

5. What countries did you visit?
Nevada

6. What would you like to have in 2004 that you lacked in 2003?
Better health

7. What date from 2003 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
December 5, because i had to pay a huge bill to the company that prints my magazine, Coagula, and I did it in time.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
There were two.
Writing a 2,400 word article on Los Angeles artists for England’s Modern Painters magazine.
Curating Chica Chic, a four artist exhibition at Bergamot Station’s Patricia Correia Gallery.

9. What was your biggest failure?
There are always a few typos you can’t change, but life goes on…

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Was diagnosed with asthma in November, got sick a few other times.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
Voting for Arnold just to piss off all of the same people who nagged me for voting for Nader.

37. Who did you miss?
The Rally Monkey

38. Who was the best new person you met?
I didn’t actually meet my Aunt Edie this year, I have known her practicaly all of my life, but I got to know her this year and she was quite an interesting person.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2003:
Just because a painting looks like a cartoon in a reproduction does not mean it will look like a cartoon in person.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
I’m sitting on my watch / so I can be on time / and singing love’s praises / in sugar-coated rhyme

Attended a small holiday party in Pasadena on Sunday evening. Artist Alex Donis was there, his art is so great. So were artists Jim Morphesis, Leigh Salgado, Milo Reese, my Art Scene editor Marlena Donahue and art historian Betty Brown, among others.

So, seeing as we were in Pasadena, my girlfriend and I thought, hey, seeing as we spent all day Saturday watching the first two Lord of the Rings on DVD yesterday, why not go see the new one on the big screen. So we did.

It was spectacular and lame at the same time. Very long and plodding and then quite terrifying. Very metaphoric on a level that inspires and then very cutesy on a sickeningly sweet level of Steven Spielberg’s dimples. So it jacked me off more than I appreciate, but the payoff wasn’t so bad. But at least we have now seen all three and can say we did so and be done with it.

And again, the amount of female participation in these films is ridiculously low, the obviousnes whereby whites are seen as saviors, the ease at which Orcs could be seen as non-white immigrants, there is a lot here that if I were in a deconstructionist mood i would go to town on. I see it as a metaphor for World War II. Hobbits are uncultured Americans – simple peope from far away suddenly called upon to save the Monarchy-based old world from the industrialist war machine of the Nazis. But it is still the most asexually homosexual movie ever made.

I gotta be honest – the Lord of the Rings, for all of its spectacuar artistry, is pretty gay. And Viggo Mortenson gets all the of what little women there are there are to go around and he is still one of the gayer characters. So much men on men on men in the movie. And the villain is a burning eyeball that looks like a cat’s pupil – OR A VAGINA. It is all about staying away from women. The message of the movie is Don’t put on the ring !. Don’t get married. Women bad, hanging with your bro’s is good. Maybe play a little Dungeons and Dragons and then go sleep outside together.

On Friday afternoon, I took my cleaning lady to Target and, for her Christmas bonus, bought a bunch of toys for her kids for Christmas. She has four kids. Earlier this week, I did the same thing for the girl who helps me sort out financial paperwork once a month (things like, coincidentally enough, my Target bill). She only has one kid. Bought the DVD of Finding Nemo both times, among a bunch of other crap.

My only insistence was that they label the presents as being from Santa Claus. Is that too sappy? Fuck it, I am a grinch and a scrooge when it comes to yuppie SUV monsters obsessing about their bad lighting decoration, trivialization of culture into packaged motifs and established traditions of must-do’s that create traffic jams and unpleasant encounters with extended family. But for kids, I am hopeless.

I took my girlfriend out to dinner at Electric Lotus on Vermont. Oh fuck, I am so full I am going to burst and we ate four hours ago. Very good vegetarian food, nice ambience, great date restaurant, we found street parking at 8 p.m. on a Friday if that means anything.

So, other than consuming, I didn’t do anything today. I am a little perturbed at how long it is taking UPS to deliver the boxes of Coagula. We shifted the magazine’s publishing schedule to avoid ever doing another issue in early December.

Spent the day sorting through crap – I am in a major purge mode. Started throwing stuff out. What am I supposed to do, leave a pile of books outside my door? I guess I could but then it gets picked over and spread out, what a mess. Adios to the stuff i no longer want or need.

George Herms was walking around the Brewery Art Colony with a reporter from Minneapolis. They were looking for the gallery. Still have to break the news to people that I would rather publish a magazine than run an art gallery. I took some copies of BLEACH Magazine from 1997 to Llyn Foulkes’ place, there was an article in it about him with great photo reproductions and I had a bunch of copies. Llyn played me a burned-CD of his one-man band performance live. It sounded very professional.

At the restaurant here, they served Elk today. I had never had it. The special was Elk stew. Oh God, it was amazing. It sustained me for hours. Not gamey at all, rich, very lean. Mmmmm.

Here is a question for people who wear glasses: do you keep your old set even when your prescription has expired – beyond for use in emergencies as a backup pair? I kept coming across old pairs of specs. tossed in the trash with all the other crap.

I totally overslept today and got a late start … on doing nothing. I got a fortune cookie Sunday night (albeit at a Thai restaurant) that reads: You will be free to take a break from your responsibilities. Fuck Yeah.

But I have a little saying that I would like to share with everyone. This concerns the barrage of opinions about Saddam’s capture that are all over the internet, but it sums up how i feel about most of what passes for analysis of the world and national situation:

Take all of your conspiracy theories and stuff them in your ass. Accept that it is a wild, uncontrollable world out there, and that the government and the propaganda machines and the media do NOT have their shit together in any way to be precise to the caliber which it would take to execute even the simplest of your complex conspiracy theories. The people in charge (and they are in charge, they don’t take orders from a little room of pointy headed cigar-smokers, nor do they answer to the architect of the Matrix), they show up to work and they just try scenario one and then they try #2 and that is all they do, they don’t pull the strings of reality, they are NOT watching me or you and their policies are not affecting our lives. We are on our own and it is so lonely out on a limb.

Now go live your life and understand that it is you who determine your fate and nobody is getting in your way in an attempt to quash or undermine your freedom.

I think the Saddam photos were hilarious. I want a t-shirt with one on it. It is like Bush is an artist and forced his model to look this way, constructed this whole mass invasion (or liberation depending on your position) in order to have these videos and pictures of an amazing personal transformation of a world-recognized person.

Finally went to Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall.Architecture Review: Not in it, just around it. Not impressed. What little public garden space there is happens to be about three feet thin and three hundred yards long with ugly, incongruent trees. And folding chairs out as an afterthought. Pathetic. The way it buttresses up to the sidewalk is oppressive and cold. And of course, almost as domineering as Frank Gehry’s ego. The gift store is not functional and they won’t make as much money as they could. and there were little bust sculptures of the classical musicians for sale. Tacky. But the T-shirts with an abstracted drawing of the Hall (not the Gehry scribble, this was a stylized logo) were nice, tasteful (the design was on mugs too and it worked), and so were the little magnets of different orchestral instruments. There were tons of classical CDs. One day i will get inside and tell you what it is like.

The lower level of the Concert Hall houses an art gallery and theater administered by Cal Arts, a non-public art school 50 miles north of L.A.Redcat Gallery and exhibition review: There is a theater and gallery run by Cal Arts called Redcat located within the Disney Hall. You walk down the street, around the corner and there it is, on the corner. It is free to get into, although the theater shows will obviously require a ticket. We did not go into the theater, but the gallery was laughable. It looked like every shitty university gallery in the world. Not a bit different, not at all improved. It was the same size about as every gallery, smaller than the one at Otis, larger than the one at USC, that sort of vibe. And the lighting was abysmal, borderline unconscionable.

The show at the Redcat Gallery was pretty much a university cookie cutter survey of an artist who was not in the top tier but had a legacy as a teacher that was as great as his legacy as an artist – have you seen this show fifty times in the past five years at schools across the country? I sure have. And this one was all too similar to the others, except it was curated by an art star, Ed Ruscha – a former student of Emerson Woelffer’s.

Well, Redcat Ruscha served up a turkey on drywall. Woelffer’s early work was outstanding, energetic, all-over and an excellent riff on the then dominant master Stuart Davis. It is no coincidence that Lari Pittman owns a classic early-50s Woelffer. The seven or so small pieceshere are masterful examples of midcentury Modernism and the large paining is a fucking masterpiece.

And then you can almost see the moment the guy gets hired as a teacher because the work immediately loses all energy and turns into dogshit when it isn’t borderline copyright violations of Robert Motherwell paintings (even Woelffer’s signature on the work is an almost xerox of Motherwell’s). Like any academic, his ripoff paintings are about five years behind the pace of the working, successful exhibiting artist he is emulating. Sure enough, he retires and the work gets somewhat interesting and experimental again, playful even. then he goes blind and dies an old man. Boo Hoo. If he had died in 1958, he would be an icon of mysterious Los Angeles possibility. Instead, he is just another pussy-chasing proff who traded freedom for security and illustrated the sadness of the end result.

So in all the tension of Cal Arts getting prime Disney Hall real estate to flex its muscles, it cannot even innovate outside of the way every single last fricking art school puts together their boring lousy little walk-in boxes designed to look at (mostly professorial) paintings. And to top it all off, there is this red and pink neon shit on the outside entrance of the gallery that looks pathetic, like scattered remnants of the 1980s that do not know what to with themselves and won’t just disappear. Unbelievable.

The parking on a Sunday in Downtown L.A. was 5 bucks. Some lots wanted 6, one even wanted 9. This is not the Downtown L.A. of my wild youth.

Hey, today is the 10th anniversary of my decision to get sober. There have been no relapses in the 3,652 days since I was blessed with the sense to remove the one thing in my life that held me back from being me. I am in a good mood thinking about all of the things I have accomplished that would never have even been tried if I had remained the heavy drinker I was. Hopefully, there will be many more accomplishments to come and i will find a better to describe my satisfaction without using “I” and “me” forty times in one half-paragraph.